Monday, August 7, 2017

BBC investigation finds poorly or unreported climate gas data threatens Paris accord. Some reports from China and India are 100% inaccurate. Northern Italy emits 6-8 times more HFC-23 than it reports. HFC-23, almost 15,000x more potent than CO2, is found in refrig. and air conditioning industries. 10,000-20,000 tons of similar chemical emitted yearly from China is unreported. Impact of poorly reported methane emissions is enough to derail Paris, per Univ. of London prof-BBC

Air monitors in Switzerland have detected large quantities of one gas [HFC-23, produced in refrigeration and air conditioning industries]coming from a location in Italy
.However, the Italian submission to the UN records just a tiny amount of the substance being emitted.

These
flaws posed a bigger threat to the Paris climate agreement than US
President Donald Trump's intention to withdraw, researchers told BBC
Radio 4's Counting Carbonprogramme.

Bottom-up records

Among
the key provisions of the Paris climate deal, signed by 195 countries
in December 2015, is the requirement that every country, rich or poor,
has to submit an inventory of its greenhouse-gas emissions every two
years.

Under UN rules, most countries produce "bottom-up"
records, based on how many car journeys are made or how much energy is
used for heating homes and offices.

But air-sampling programmes that record actual levels of gases, such
as those run by the UK and Switzerland, sometimes reveal errors and
omissions.

In 2011, Swiss scientists first published their data on levels of a gas called HFC-23 coming from a location in northern Italy.

Between
2008 and 2010, they had recorded samples of the chemical, produced in
the refrigeration and air conditioning industries,which is14,800 times
more warming to the atmosphere than CO2.

Now the scientists, at
the Jungfraujoch Swiss air monitoring station, have told the BBC the gas
is still going into the atmosphere.

Methane,
the second most abundant greenhouse gas after CO2, is produced by
microbe activity in marshlands, in rice cultivation, from landfill, from
agriculture and in the production of fossil fuels. Global levels have been rising in recent years, and scientists are unsure why.

For
a country such as India, home to 15% of the world's livestock, methane
is a very important gas in their inventory - but the amount produced is
subject to a high degree of uncertainty.

"What they note is that methane emissions are about 50% uncertain for
categories like ruminants, so what this means is that the emissions
they submit could be plus or minus 50% of what's been submitted," said
Dr Anita Ganesan, from the University of Bristol, who has overseen air
monitoring research in the country.

"For nitrous oxide, that's 100%."

There are similar uncertainties with methane emissions in Russia, of between 30-40%, according to scientists who work there.

"What
we're worried about is what the planet experiences, never mind what the
statistics are," said Prof Euan Nisbet, from Royal Holloway, University
of London.

The rules covering how countries report their emissions are currently being negotiated.

But
Prof Glen Peters, from the Centre for International Climate Research,
in Oslo, said: "The core part of Paris [is] the global stock-takes which
are going to happen every five years, and after the stock-takes
countries are meant to raise their ambition, but if you can't track
progress sufficiently, which is the whole point of these stock-takes,
you basically can't do anything.

The key to this scam, [allegedly] designed to curb global warming, is a scheme
known as the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), set up under the 1997
Kyoto Protocol and administered by the UN. It enables firms and
governments in the developed world to buy “credits” which allow them to
continue emitting greenhouse gases. These are sold to them, through
well-rewarded brokers, from firms in developing countries that can show
they have nominally reduced their emissions.

Easily the largest and most lucrative component in the CDM market is a
peculiar racket centred on the manufacture of CFCs,
chlorofluorocarbons, classified under Kyoto as greenhouse gases vastly
more damaging than carbon dioxide.

The way the racket works is that Chinese and Indian firms are
permitted to carry on producing a refrigerant gas known as HCF-22 until
2030. But a by-product of this process is HCF-23, which is supposed to
be 11,700 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2. By destroying
the HCF-23, the firms can claim Certified Emission Reduction credits
worth billions of dollars when sold to the West (while much of the
useful HCF-22 is sold onto the international black market).”

The payments were supposed to cease around 2013, the bureacracy around “reporting” can be seen on this EPA web site:

“Chinese and Indian companies are holding the world hostage by
threatening to set off a climate bomb if they don’t receive millions of
dollars for the destruction of the HFC-23 that they are producing,” said
Mark W. Roberts, EIA’s International Policy Advisor.”"